The ongoing battle between Facebook and Twitter over which platform is the Top Social Media Superpower has reached a
new plateau: playing copy cat. Facebook announced last week that users can now create hashtags to track various conversation topics. Twitter, of course, has been using hashtags since Day 1.
Since purchasing Instagram for $1 billion earlier this year, Facebook has laid relatively low. With Twitter’s recent adoption of video sharing through Vine, Facebook’s brainstorming team was put under pressure to come up with similar functionality. Just last week they mailed out rather cryptic invitations to media outlets inviting them to join their team for coffee and a special announcement on June 20th. Apparently the next big thing, according to Instagram’s head honchos, is their new “Cinema” feature that will allow Instagrammers to shoot and post 15-second videos with a built in stabilizing feature. But does anyone really notice “shakiness” in a video that’s a quarter of a minute long? Zuckerberg just spent a couple million dollars fixing a non-problem. Oh, and it’s only available for those with the iPhone 5 and the newly launched iOS software, therefore most people probably can’t even use it. Facebook users have been asking for “Love it!” or “Dislike” buttons for a couple years now and instead, this is what their team came up with? It’s like saying you’ll bring ice cream to a birthday party, but bringing greek yogurt instead. Disappointing.
The use of images of all sorts has taken social media sharing to an entirely new level. Instagram is used to take pictures, add filters, then post them for friends or account followers. Vine is an application that allows users to record a short video clip (all in six seconds or less) and post it to their Twitter account. Instagram alone had a record 100 million users by September 2012 and continues to gain one new user and post 58 pictures each second. Vine has just recently become popular in the last few months, but already has over 13 million users.
Mark Zuckerberg should take notice or he might just find something like this in his Facebook messages this week:
Dear Facebook:
It is not completely clear how Cinema will differ from Vine other than that extra nine seconds of you making your morning latte or your cat chasing a ball of yarn, but we can’t imagine it’s all that new: You shoot it. You post it. You share it.
Twitter seems to be the true pioneer of visual social media. Facebook, where’s the originality?
We were hoping for a curve ball,
Unamused Facebookers